True Standing 7: Hakan Edition

Thought I'd investigate this after being contacted by youtube user sudafreekan inquiring if it was possible. Can't find any vids or documentation on anyone ever doing it, so here it is.


In case you've already seen the Gief+Hawk standing 720 vid I did a while back, You might be wondering what the big deal is here. Basically, both Gief and T.Hawk have 6 pre-jump animation frames (that is, after pressing up, there's a further 5 frames before the character actually leaves the ground). The purpose of this is to make standing 360 motions more manageable (as this is a standard part of their game). However, even with that, true, unbuffered standing 720's are still hella difficult.

In SSFIV Hakan has only 5 pre-jump frames. Now, this might not seem like a big difference but in terms of this technique, it's huge. The motion I'm using here is a 540, clock-wise from FORWARD to BACK (the minimum motion required to do the ultra). So, after hitting the first UP motion, there's another 7 directions before you reach BACK and can actually activate the Ultra. So how is it possible? Since the game only really requires F, D, B, U, F, D, B+PPP, you can still do it with only 3 more inputs (FORWARD, DOWN and BACK+PPP). Since, I'm not consciously missing out the diagonal directions and knowing that the game runs at 60 frames a second, I have to assume that the spin occurs so fast that the game simply doesn't 'update' quickly enough to detect the diagonal inputs. Meaning that the final 7 inputs are performed but only 3 of them (the important ones) actually show up on screen.

Whatever is actually happening, Hakan can technically perform a standing, unbuffered Ultra 1.